


In the Hands of the Godless

by allyoops



Category: Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: (I mean it IS Alanna after all), F/M, Forced Orgasm, Forced Submission, Illusions and Visions, Rape/Non-con Elements, Sex Magic, abuse of magic, bratty sub
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:54:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26270722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allyoops/pseuds/allyoops
Summary: Roger dies looking into her eyes, and for a moment he thinks he has come back the same way.But it’s not her. Not yet.He does not wait long to make it so.
Relationships: Alanna of Pirate's Swoop and Olau/Roger of Conté
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11
Collections: Femsub Semi-Flash 2020





	In the Hands of the Godless

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PrisonersDilemma](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrisonersDilemma/gifts).



The last moments of Roger’s first life were encased in orange fog and cleaved by lightning. He saw violet eyes, burning, scornful, triumphant . . . and then he fell.

Those images chased him into the punishing hell of his sleep, a contortion of hate and pain and the other thing, that thing he had felt just before he fell, when he was staring at her face, at those eyes, the lying chit who had deceived him, who had bested and killed him in front of everyone he had sought to conquer.

He kept the memory of her buried with him there, his mind wrapped around her in the confounding prison of his sleep, so that when the purple tendrils of a Gift reached in to fetch him, called him forth from the fog and the dark, he simply assumed it was her.

When he woke and saw her bending over him, he nodded, satisfied.

“Alanna.”

The vision cleared its throat.

“Thom, actually. I’m . . . the other one.”

The twin. Roger frowned. Thom raised an eyebrow, and damn if the supercilious scepticism wasn’t an eerie near-copy of his sister.

“Don’t tell me you were hoping to be resurrected by the girl who killed you, your Grace.”

He was hoping to do a few things to the girl who’d killed him, but saw no point in speaking so plainly to her brother. Boy might feel bound to take offence, and Roger had use for him yet.

“Of course not,” he said, and wondered if Thom believed him. “Tell me, lad: what have I missed?”

* * *

He convinced the boy of all he would have him believe, or at least robbed him of the proof he could lay hold of to prove him false, but Alanna would be impossible to persuade. Maybe trying to kill her and her lover besides had made too lasting an impression, he thought dryly, watching her berate her brother for his foolishness. Thom was the palest shadow of his former self, and Alanna in contrast was living fire, vital and raging and alive. Roger, stirred to desire by the sight of her, turned abruptly from the shallow bowl in which he amused himself with idly scrying, from time to time.

More obvious signs of magical implements he dared not risk, but a dish of water was harmless enough, and he periodically admitted a cat or two to better justify its presence in his chamber.

It was vexing, to desire her. He loathed himself for it. Consorts and dalliances he did not lack. He had always been well set up in that way, and the idea of partnering himself with a more worthy individual in her own right had simply not appealed. He might, on ascending the throne, require Queen and heir in time, but he was a man without equal.

And then had come Alanna.

Gods damn her, even in the tomb she had not let him be. She had harried him through his near-death, and stole more of his focus now than he cared to admit. And truth be told, she was his surest means not only of regaining the throne, but keeping it.

So he contrived to meet her on the wall overlooking City Gate, on his own terms, and even more carefully he contrived to ensure she would not know it.

This was the difficulty. Using magic without appearing to. Siphoning just enough off via the Gate that he could work the illusion on himself and his time, and have none remaining to stain him.

None left to detect.

She found him as his true self, clean and elegant, and it pained his vanity that she would remember him differently, but there would be time enough to repair her opinion of him on that front, even if he proved it on all others. For now he needed her to submit, and forget she had done so. He needed her vigilant Bazhir guardsmen to forget it, too, which meant it would have to be a perilous short working indeed.

He had magic in readiness when she approached, set aside from his person, and was careful not to draw on as he goaded her to search him. She found no trace of it, and he saw the moment she relaxed her guard; then he leaned in, and took her by the wrist.

“You’ve changed, Squire Alan,” he breathed. “You’re very much the experienced knight, aren’t you? And you don’t fear me anymore—not as you did once.”

Then he whipped the magic out like a knotted cord, shielding them in its loops, and leashed her with it.

“More the fool you,” he concluded, and smiled.

Time hung suspended around them, ground down as the cogs of a mighty machine, momentarily paused. Alanna spun, staring, as birds arrested their flight midair, as the beast at her side made as if to leap, but was frozen mid crouch. None of these peripheral objects attracted him: it was on Alanna that his focus lay.

He had longed to shock her; to see her eyes start with fear and surprise, but instead there was only cold violet fury as he jerked the phantom leash and brought her to her knees.

“What,” he said lightly, “you yield? I’d not have thought it of a Lioness, but I will own you look very pretty on your knees. Perhaps I will keep you there more often, in the future.”

She could not speak, per his working, but he could feel her fighting the enchantment, burning through his defences like dry straw. He would not have long to enjoy this, if he wished the closure to remain intact.

He stepped closer. She knelt, unnaturally rigid on the stone, every sinew trapped in the posture he willed her to maintain. He contemplated her a moment, then reached out, gentle, careless, to take her chin and force her face up.

“This is a rend in the fabric of time. A moment’s stolen pleasure. You will not remember this. None of you.” His gaze strayed to the Bazhir ranged on the ground below. “They are outside what happens to you now. They think you stand before me as an equal.”

He looked down at her again, coldly scornful.

“I have no equal, Alanna. But you came as close as any could, and it gives me particular pleasure to take my own back in this manner.”

Curiosity bested him, then, and he released the working on her mouth, curious to hear her response. Her lip curled.

“Why am I not surprised you fight like a coward in your second life, too?”

He bent and seized the back of her neck in a punishing grip, forcing her to look him in the eye. She did not flinch, but set her jaw. He searched her face, then laughed.

“Before this is over, Alanna, I’ll see you on your back, as well as your knees. I chose to put you in your place now so that you would remember it better later. Now stand, and forget this happened.”

He stepped away and she jerked upwards as if on strings. Then the jaws of the enchantment snapped shut, and she stumbled, just slightly, to a standstill before him. The cat shook itself, fur bristling, and Roger tolerated her confused stare as it lit on his garments, where he had soiled them.

He could see her trying to remember what had passed between them outside of normal time, and he could see the moment it eluded her.

Her expression cleared, and she shoved her hands into her pockets.

He was only a man, she told him. She could deal with him.

“I’m sure you can, my dear,” he said, and it was not even a lie. He enjoyed watching the words land.

* * *

He chased her into her Ordeal vision with single-minded purpose. Ripped her from her vigil at his noble cousin’s side, took her in his arms and danced her through his tomb. She fought him, desperately, but the vision was of his own working, the Ordeal her prison and she its willing prisoner. She would not abandon her post at Jon’s side, and until she did, she could not escape him.

He danced her outside of time, inside her own mind, and he could see the moment that her memory of their time in the shadow of the battlement came crashing back down around her.

He laughed, richly victorious, and backed her up to the stone slab on which he had lain in readiness, waiting to receive her.

Now _she_ would receive _him_ , and she had not even the pleasure of crying out in defiance as she did.

“Will you remember this when you return to the land of the waking?” he wondered, bearing her down on the cold rock. Chains lay in readiness and he secured her with them, watching her face flush with the effort of containing her own invective: the need to remain silent warred with her desire to speak plain truth. Self-restraint had never been her forte in any guise.

“Will you remember how you longed to curse me, but knew you could not do so without also cursing your protection of the man who took you to his bed even as I tried to take his throne?”

He rose up over her, studying the lines of her face, her true self, the woman she so often felt obliged to conceal. He remembered the page’s stubborn chin, the fire of Alan’s temper, and saw its full maturation in Alanna, bound, and awaiting his pleasure.

He understood the squire fully now that he saw the woman the boy had become. Understood whence the ferocity had originated, in desire thwarted, purpose stifled.

Just as he would thwart and stifle her now.

“I could magic away these garments,” he murmured, trailing a hand slowly down her thigh, “but I like you in them.”

He climbed atop her, eyes gleaming, and felt his way to the parting in the cloth. The place where her legs joined.

“You will return from your Ordeal having known both the young King who will not survive ascending to his throne, and the King who will supplant him in all of time and story thereafter. You should thank me for the privilege, Lioness.”

He had found what he sought, the sweetest, softest center of her, and toyed with her there, splashing her liberally with his Gift, stoking her to desire to arousal to inferno until she arched, lips parted, the very softest part of her clamping around his knuckles as her eyes clenched shut and her mouth opened in wordless fury at the betrayal of her own pleasure coursing through her.

“You should thank me for that, too,” he laughed, and enjoyed the murderous hate that sliced into him from where she lay, bound and silent on the cold stone, a traitorous damp spot on the rock beneath her backside proof of her own unwilling pleasure. “I’m sure you would, if the Code permitted such a thing.”

Then he bent down and kissed her, cruelly, and sent her back to her senses with the scream still stifled in her throat.

* * *

Their last meeting he had magicked also. Wrote forgetfulness onto his person and alternate motivations all through the runes, lies woven with the truth of his desire if not the means by which he meant to obtain it, and he cursed his own overcaution but he did not back down from the safeguard.

If it should fail, he would not have her flatter herself with the memory of his true aim. He would not let it be known that he was unequal to succession without her by his side. If he could not make her submit, take her Gift for his own use and ally himself to the young King’s sword when he took the kingship and the sword for himself, he would certainly not leave her with the memory that he had ever tried.

But he awaited her in the chamber with the gate drawn at his feet and the magical workings writ all over what he intended should be his wedding and coronation robes alike, and he really thought he had mastered her. She walked heedless through the first enchantment and the truth he’d magicked into the doorway crashed over her. He saw her spin, feverish, the memory of her true Ordeal and the battlement humiliation rising up in her again, and had just time enough to pin her to the rock with the dried-blood fire of his purloined magics before she could gather wit to fight him.

He was already hard as he advanced on her. The working he had chosen for this was almost crude in its arcane fashion: magic driven by the coupling of man was the old stuff, inelegant and clumsy, but there was a real power behind it and he trusted in the finesse of his spells to carry the thing off. He would take her, and he would take her Gift, and he would have what he needed to ensure his victory.

She stood pinned, legs splayed, and she could not fight him off. She stared balefully into his face as he found her again, touched with cruel tenderness the sweetest, softest part of the hardest, proudest woman he had ever met.

“Women have begged for what I am about to give you now,” he told her, and she laughed.

“You shouldn’t brag about the company you keep if their standards are that low,” she scorned, and he lost his temper in that moment. Slapped her mouth, and grabbed her by the hips, and forced his way inside.

That was when he knew it had all gone wrong.

His Gift should have surged up with him at his entrance. Should have pierced her as his flesh did, and met, captured and conquered her Gift as it found her, and bound her, irrevocably, to the man who had claimed her this way. But instead there was only Alanna, hot, angry and human. There was no meeting and merging of magics, only the Lioness staring murder into his face as he thrust into her, and thrust, and . . .

“Gods damn you where is your Gift?” he raged.

And the bitch actually laughed!

“Is that what the little boys call it?” she said dryly. “You’ll need to visit the whorehouses, Roger. Seems you’re overdue for a man’s education.”

And the scorn that burned in her eyes snapped something inside him.

He pinned her to the wall and thrust furiously into the core of her. Livid, pounding rage, unrelenting, fucking her with mindless fury, impaling her again, and again, and again, until she had to shrink from the force of it, had to shut her eyes to endure, but he was past caring, past seeing it as victory, past anything but a furious scream as the binding of his own spell on them both thinned and tightened and _snapped_ , just like his own tenuous hold on his mind.

The break threw them apart with a clap of thunder. Sent him spinning back out of time, out of the memory of his loss and his defeat, to stand at the center of the gate once more.

And Alanna walked in again, a vision in gold mail, the King’s sword, the King’s Champion, and it was Roger of Conté’s turn to be impaled in the tomb.

**Author's Note:**

> Your prompt for this intrigued me. I haven't read these books in ages, so I appreciate the excuse to dip back into them!
> 
> I agree with you that Roger seems much too sensible and effective a villain to devolve as he did in canon, and I hope this alternate glimpse into one possible other angle to his scheming is something like what you had in mind.


End file.
